Southern Ghost (27 page)

Sullenly, Charlotte shook her head. Shaking fingers tugged at her necklace of pink pearls. “But someone could be up there,” she persisted.

An expression of distaste crossed Miss Dora’s aristocratic face. “The patrolman is now checking each room. As soon as that search is complete, you may feel quite safe to go inside.” She sniffed. “Why in heaven’s name would anyone want to shoot you, Charlotte?”

Chief Wells moved ponderously to the edge of the porch to listen to Charlotte’s answer. One cheek bulged with a wad of tobacco.

Charlotte wrapped her arms tightly across her chest. Her voice shook with anger. “Why did someone shoot the Judge? Answer me that! Why did someone set fire to my museum? Answer me that! I’ll tell you why! Someone hates the Tarrants!” Her eyes flicked venomously toward Annie and Max. “And why are
they
always here when there’s trouble? He was the last one who saw that girl, too! That’s what it said in the paper. Why are they—”

“Because I called for them.” Miss Dora’s bony jaw jutted obstinately. “Whatever happens here concerns all of the Family—and Mr. and Mrs. Darling are assisting the Family at my behest. Once you are somewhat in control of yourself, Charlotte, perhaps you can tell us what happened here tonight.” The old lady’s hands tightened on the silver knob of her cane.

Charlotte clasped her hands together, but they still trembled. “We were in the drawing room after dinner. Whitney was working with his stamps, and I was reading—a monograph on silver thimbles made in Charleston between 1840 and 1860. I wanted to check another source—a paper written by another authority—and I went into the library—”

A shout and a piercing whistle sounded out on the street.

Wells barked, “Stay here, all of you!” He thudded down the stairs and loped around the end of the house. For a big man, he moved fast.

“Hey, you…” a man called hoarsely.

“Hold up there. Stop or we’ll shoot!” Annie recognized Wells’s deep voice. “All right, buddy. Hands up. Walk this way. Right. Keep right along.”

Harris Walker, his arms lifted, his face stubbled with beard, stumbled around the side of the house. He blinked against the light hanging in the live oak. Then he saw Annie and Max. “What’s happening here?” he demanded.

Charlotte Tarrant gave a little scream. “Who is he? Is he the one? Dear God, I knew it. We’ll all be killed in our beds—”

“Hush.” Miss Dora’s tone was deadly and not to be ignored.

Charlotte subsided, but her wide, staring eyes never left Walker’s haggard face.

Annie spoke first. “That’s Courtney’s boyfriend—and he’s hunting her.”

Charlotte took a step back. “Here. Here?”

Walker turned on Wells. “Listen, I got bloodhounds out here today and—”

Wells held up a meaty hand. “I know. There isn’t much that goes on in this town that I don’t know, Walker. But so what? I understand the young woman came to this house and to Miss Dora’s earlier in the week. The hounds don’t show us anything.”

Walker’s arms sagged. He swallowed jerkily. “They stopped dragging the river. Late this afternoon.”

Wells didn’t tell the young man to lift his arms again. Instead, he simply nodded, his craggy face somber.

“Does that mean…” Walker clenched his fists. “Where are you looking for her? Where are you looking now, dammit?”

The look on his face made Annie want to cry.

Wells tipped back his cowboy hat. “We have an APB out and—”

“That’s nothing,” Walker shouted. “There should be people out everywhere. When I got to town, all you talked about was him.” He jerked a shoulder at Max. “But you know that’s stupid. Something happened to Courtney because of the Tarrants, because somebody killed her dad. It’s all tied up with them. Have you looked in this house? Have you?” He stood there, his young body tense, and he had the air of a soldier on attack despite his unshaven cheeks and dusty, torn clothes.

“There’s an officer searching this house right now.”

A tiny flicker of hope moved in Walker’s sunken eyes.

“That’s absurd.” Whitney glared at Walker. “What’s he saying? That we’ve done something with the girl?”

Charlotte swept forward, a shaking hand pointing at Walker. “Arrest him! You must arrest him—obviously, he’s the one.”

Wells rocked back on his feet. “Let’s have some answers, Walker. What are you doing here?”

“I was driving by. Any law against that? I just keep driving, driving, driving. I think maybe I’ll see her. …” He rubbed the back of his fist against his unshaven face. “I keep looking for her. …”

“Where’s your car?” Wells demanded.

“Out in front.”

The back door slammed.

Everyone looked up on the piazza at the patrolman.

Walker took a step forward.

Matthews reported to Wells. “The house is empty, sir. No sign of entry or exit elsewhere. Nothing else appears to be disturbed.” He took the flashlight back from the chief. Wells didn’t bother with a thank-you.

Nice man to work for, Annie thought.

Miss Dora thumped her cane. “Time is wasting.” She pointed the cane at Charlotte. “When was the last time you were in the library?”

The chief gave Walker a swift glance. “I’ll deal with you later. Just stay right where you are.” Wells shoved the light back at the patrolman and pulled out a notebook and a pen.

Walker glanced from the chief to the Tarrants, his eyes hard and suspicious. Annie knew nothing could have driven him out of that shadowy garden.

Charlotte gave Walker another hostile glance, then hurried to answer when Miss Dora waggled the cane at her impatiently. “Why, I suppose not since this morning. I returned several books from the drawing room—you see, we read in the evenings and there are always books about but we leave them until morning. That’s when I straighten up. It must have been about ten this morning. I put the books up and closed the door. I didn’t go back in until tonight.”

“What time?” Max asked.

Charlotte looked at him resentfully, but answered before Miss Dora could intervene. “It must have been just before
nine. Yes.” She spoke with more assurance, looking toward Whitney. “It was just before nine, wasn’t it?”

Her husband nodded, but he was staring at the piazza, with its scattering of broken glass. “Hell of a thing, to have someone break in. Never happened before. Never.”

Wells wrote briefly in his notebook. “So, the brick could have been thrown through the French door anytime between ten this morning and nine tonight.” He sounded profoundly unhappy.

Annie didn’t blame him. That was a hell of a time span.

The chief glanced back inside the library. “Was the drawer locked?”

No one spoke.

Now Wells became impatient. “Mr. Tarrant, was that drawer—the one where the gun was kept—was it generally kept locked?”

“No.” Whitney sounded puzzled. “It’s just an ordinary desk, Chief. I keep my important papers at the office.”

“So you had this gun in a drawer where anyone could get at it?” His disgust with careless householders was apparent. Annie didn’t blame him.

Whitney’s head jerked up. “I beg your pardon. It isn’t as though our library is a public thoroughfare. That weapon has been kept there for years and—”

“How many years?” Wells demanded.

The silence this time was distinctly strained.

Whitney and Charlotte glanced at each other.

Charlotte gasped. “Whitney, I never thought—was that the gun—” She whimpered and pressed the back of her hand against her mouth.

Whitney blinked nervously. “It was the Judge’s gun from the War. It was always kept there until—oh, God, I don’t know what happened that day! But that’s the gun”—he swallowed convulsively—“my brother used. Granddad brought it to me months later and asked if I wanted it back. I said yes because somehow that made it seem as if it had truly ended.”

“Loaded?” Wells asked.

Whitney’s eyes fell away from the chief’s cold stare.

That was answer enough.

“World War Two issue, that would be a forty-five-caliber Colt M-nineteen-eleven-A-one.” Wells absently moved the wad of tobacco in his cheek. “All right. So somebody took it sometime today.” He scrawled in his notebook.

Max stood with his hands jammed into his pockets, his face thoughtful. “Miss Dora, you called Mr. and Mrs. Tarrant tonight and arranged for tomorrow’s gathering here. And you must also have called the others.”

Annie expected another outburst from Charlotte Tarrant. But the harried woman satisfied herself with a silent, vengeful look at Miss Dora.

“I did indeed. And that meeting shall occur as I have decreed.” Miss Dora ignored Charlotte. “Why do you ask?”

“It would be very interesting to know,” Max said slowly, “if that gun was taken
after
your phone calls.”

Chief Wells’s heavy head turned toward Max. “What do you have in mind, Darling?”

Max looked toward the piazza. “I’m not certain, Chief. It’s just that the murderer may be getting scared—and that worries me.”

Wells’s jaw moved rhythmically. His huge hand dropped to the butt of the pistol holstered on his hip. His message was unmistakable. “You don’t need to worry, Darling. I’ll be here.”

The St. George Inn was lovely, but it wasn’t home. There was no pistachio ice cream in the freezer. The pantry lacked brownies laced with raspberry, and the supply of peanut butter cookies was dangerously low. Coffee, of course, they had in abundance, and the thermos had kept the Colombian decaf hot. But there was something terribly unsatisfactory about coffee unaccompanied by edibles.

“Want a cookie?” Annie asked. She hoped her guardian angel was dutifully posting a gold star because there were only
four peanut butter cookies left, and if Max took one now and so did she, that would leave only one for bedtime and one for breakfast and, as all peanut butter cookie lovers know, that would make a bummer out of breakfast.

“No thanks, sweetie. More coffee, though.” Max held up his cup, but he never lifted his eyes from his papers.

Annie reached for a cookie. She was too cool, too disciplined to grab. Crunch. Pure pleasure. She looked up at the clock. Almost eleven. God, what a night. And she was still worried about pale, driven Harris Walker. At least he hadn’t been arrested. Annie suspected Walker was free because he’d given the police permission to search his car and him. No gun turned up. So Wells told him to stay away from Tarrant House and left it at that. But, as Walker drove off, Annie knew he was looking back at the house.

There hadn’t been, of course, any resolution to the break-in. The only certain fact was that the loaded gun was gone.

Not a cheerful prospect.

And she didn’t share Wells’s conviction that all would be well so long as he was present.

She finished her cookie, then poured the coffee and bent over to kiss the tip of Max’s ear. Surely it was time to quit work for the night.

“Oh, yeah,” he said positively. But it was rather more of an automatic response than she had hoped for, and he kept right on writing on his legal pad.

Annie refreshed his mug and her own, then dropped onto the chaise longue. She yawned. “Maybe Wells is the murderer. You know, maybe the Judge caught him out in something and the chief slipped into Tarrant House that Saturday afternoon and shot the Judge and slipped right back out. Then Ross came in and maybe his mother had got there just before him and he walked in and she was holding the gun and—”

Max finished writing with a flourish, ripped off the top sheet, and leaned over the coffee table to hand it to her. “Here’s what we need to find out.”

She looked at Max’s list.

Annie took a bite from her peanut butter cookie. Either the sugar or the list produced a spurt of energy. With a flourish, she gave Max an admiring salute. “Right on, Sherlock.” He had certainly winnowed through what they’d learned and come up with a succinct, to-the-point list of all the questions raised by their new knowledge.

Max accepted her tribute with an almost modest smile. “A good detective has to discard the irrelevant.”

Was there a hint, just a hint, of complacency there? A suggestion that others (and we all knew who that would be) were bogged in minutiae, unable to ascertain what was meaningful?

Although Annie would never admit to competitive feelings with her live-in sleuth, she was just a tad irritated. Her eyes slitted. Grace Latham might expect to be treated like a dimwit by Colonel Primrose; Annie wasn’t having any.

Grabbing her notebook, she wrote furiously. In a moment, she ripped out the sheet and thrust it toward him.

Max studied her conclusions, which were, she would have admitted had she been pressed, not organized well in terms of time and space, but they got to the damn point. After all, what really counted in murder? Motives, of course.